•  1
    Gewissensfreiheit und die Grenzen des Staates
    Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (1): 5-39. 2023.
    Um das achtzehnte Jahrhundert herum zogen verschiedene Denker dem Staat eine auch heute noch vielbeachtete Grenze: Religion ist Privatsache. Fragen der Religion lägen jenseits dessen, wo der Staat legitimerweise wirken könne. Diese Forderung nach einer Trennung von Staat und Religion wird heute wesentlich als eine Frage der Gewissensfreiheit gedeutet. Wo wir Gewissensfreiheit missachten, erlegen wir Individuen unzumutbare Gewissensnöte auf Der Laizismus bewahrt damit die Unverletzlichkeit religi…Read more
  •  446
    Moral subjectivism is commonly associated with out-of-favour theories like, e.g., Alfred Ayer’s emotivism or John Mackie’s error theory. This paper approaches the field against the background of the attitudinal character of morality and religion. The possibility of a brand of moral subjectivism is established which is common to Ayer’s and Mackie’s theories in name only yet still has significant merits. The perspective from action theory and the philosophy of mind suggests that the problem of mor…Read more
  •  104
    Rigidity and Modal Asymmetry: The intuitive Kripkean argument revisited
    In Ansgar Beckermann & Christian Nimtz (eds.), Argument & Analyse, Mentis. pp. 306-320. 2002.
    Much of what has been discussed in the theory of reference in the last twenty-five years is strongly influenced by considerations centring on the business of devising a semantics for quantified modal logic. In this context, discussion of the property of rigidity plays an important role. This property is conceived of as a semantic modal property that distinguishes proper names from descriptions. It is argued that there is a semantic modal asym- metry between expressions of these types. In this ta…Read more
  •  13
    Dieses Buch diskutiert als erste Monographie vor dem Hintergrund der Kennzeichnungstheorie Russells die Thematik der unvollständigen Kennzeichnungen. Ausdrücke wie “der Tisch”, “das Kaufhaus” und “der Busfahrer” sind für natürlichsprachliche Verwendungen besonders typisch, sie erlauben die Bezugnahme auf einen Gegenstand trotz des Umstandes, daß das enthaltene Prädikat von vielen Gegenständen erfüllt wird. Von ihrer Untersuchung ausgehend entwickelt der Autor einen heterodoxen Beitrag zur Konzep…Read more
  •  10
    The theory of the just price is commonly assumed to have three sources: Political philosophy of Greek antiquity, scholastic ethics of the High Middle Ages, and the Roman law of obligations of late antiquity. While closer inspection confirms this holds for the first two worlds of thought the latter assumption seems ultimately unfounded. The paper claims that the evidence notoriously presented on behalf of that assumption – two rescripts attributed to Roman emperor Diocletian, namely Codex Iustini…Read more
  •  49
    Adam Smith said that ‘the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.’ Smith addressed the mark of the man economical, and there is no denying that this is the peculiar way he acts: clearly, to truck, barter and exchange is to act in a certain way. Austrian economics adopts this way of looking at the realm of economics. It prides itself as a theory of human action. This claim seems ill-founded as long as so imp…Read more
  •  48
    Meta-linguistic Descriptivism and the Opacity of Quotation
    Acta Analytica 29 (4): 413-426. 2014.
    The paper unfolds a non-modal problem for (moderate) meta-linguistic descriptivism, the thesis that the meaning of a proper name (e.g. ‘Aristotle’) is given by a meta-linguistic description of a certain type (e.g. ‘the bearer of “Aristotle”’). According to this theory, if ⌜α⌝ is a proper name, it is a sufficient condition for the name’s being significant that the description ⌜the bearer of ⌜α⌝⌝ is significant. However, a quotational expression may be significant even when the expression quoted i…Read more
  •  236
    What is discrimination and what makes wrongful discrimination wrong? Even after an ever-rising tide of research over the course of the past twenty-five or so years these questions still remain hard to answer. Exercising candid and self-critical hindsight, Larry Alexander, who contributed his fair share to this tide, thus remarked: “All cases of discrimination, if wrongful, are wrongful either because of their quite contingent consequences or perhaps because they are breaches of promises or fiduc…Read more